Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(11)

And still get the, allegedly, best bagels in London.

And if you wanted a bell made good and proper, you went to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, established 1570. Currently occupying the best part of a Georgian townhouse and various industrial extensions out the back. It was here that they recast Big Ben after the original bell cracked.

While Guleed chased her paperwork and eyed up the halal delights of the café’s menu, I spent an interesting half an hour on the phone to MOLA. They recognised the names of the site reports I’d found in Richard Williams’s office but didn’t think they had anything in common beyond being digs from the last five years and all from around the city proper. Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology – projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It’s not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing – but take snacks, because you’re going to be there for a while.

‘There was one thing,’ said the helpful lady at MOLA. ‘At one of the sites . . . Adrian will know.’

There was much shouting to see if Adrian was around, a bit of a wait and then the man himself took the phone – he sounded like he was from the Northeast with just a threat of full-on Geordie, should the need arise.

‘Is this about the thefts?’ he said.

Thefts – plural.

‘How many thefts have there been?’ I asked.

‘That depends on how you define it,’ said Adrian.

Because material went missing off sites all the time, which is why important finds were collated and secured the day they were found.

Important in archaeological terms not always being the same as valuable – at least not in the fenceable sense. Archaeology came in all shapes, sizes, and apparent degrees of nickableness.

‘We wouldn’t have even noticed some of the thefts if they hadn’t been important to the context,’ said Adrian.

Context being the key concept of modern scientific archaeology, and what separates your modern professional from the fumbling archivists and swivel-eyed tomb raiders of the past. It’s a religion they share with scene of crime technicians and it had been drummed into me from my first day at Hendon.

Context – where you find an object – is more important than the actual object. In policing it’s whether the broken glass is on the inside or the outside. In archaeology it’s whether that datable coin is found in the wall foundations or its demolition infill. You can live without the coin, but you need the dating information.

‘Material was taken from about five sites,’ said Adrian. ‘I’ll have to check the reports to be certain, but as I recall it was nearly all Roman brick.’

Apparently, the only thing the sites had in common was that they were within London and they all either had ritual significance in the Roman era or had been repurposed as church sites during the five hundred years or so following the withdrawal of the Empire from Britain.

I asked whether the thefts seemed random or whether the pattern made sense in archaeological terms.

‘Whoever it was didn’t just scoop things up at random, so I’d say they knew what they were looking for,’ he said. ‘Assuming it was the same person.’

I got a firm promise that he’d email the details to us, and warned him I might need to contact him again. He seemed moderately pleased by that.

The boys and girls back at the Annexe would soon be adding archaeologist to the mix of qualities they were looking for in an associate of Martin Chorley – see, context.

But I did wonder what the hell they wanted Roman bricks for.

‘Nothing good,’ said Guleed.

Both us having actioned our morning actions we finished up and popped over to find out exactly what Richard Williams had wanted a bell for.



When you arrive unexpectedly at someone’s house you go in through the front door, often after making sure you’ve got a couple of mates waiting round the back. For a business, especially the kind that involves big trucks and heavy metal, it’s always better to go in through the back. The customer-facing part of any modern business is purposely designed to be as politely unhelpful as possible. If you go in from the rear, the customer-facing staff are all facing the wrong way and everybody starts their conversation on the back foot.

Apart from us, of course.

The big gates round the back on Plumber’s Row were open for a delivery, so we walked in bold as brass until someone shouted at us. We showed them our warrant cards, but they weren’t impressed – they weren’t going to talk to us until we were wearing hard hats and had signed in.

We did as we were told, both me and Guleed being big fans of health and safety, particularly when it’s our health and safety. Plus you could feel the heat of the main furnace from five metres away. Molten copper, I learnt later, for a relatively small one ton church bell. It filled the workshop with a smell like fresh blood.

London used to be full of workshops, craftsmen and manufactories. But the industrial revolution sucked all the jobs north, where the water and the coal flowed freely and a man could wear a flat cap and fancy his whippet free from fear. Much of what made Dickensian London Dickensian was driven by that shift. What people forget is that, in the short term, the Luddites were right.

Still – policing is a service industry, so no worries there.